Spinoza vs. the Kahal: The Zionist Critique of Spinoza’s Politics

Abstract: The 1920s and 30s witnessed an explosion of interest in Spinoza among Zionist intellectuals. The reflexive equation of nation and state has led scholars to conclude that Zionists were drawn to Spinoza because he justified state sovereignty. This assumption is mistaken. Eastern European Zionists rejected Spinoza’s sovereignty-centered political thought—precisely because it denies political standing to non-sovereign bodies such as the kahal. Drawing on diasporic history, Spinoza’s Zionist critics elaborated a distinctive political vision that prized national autonomy but did not equate self-rule with sovereign power. I foreground Zionist repudiation of Spinozist sovereignty to challenge reigning assumptions about the ideological sources of non-sovereign politics. Theorists influenced by German Jewish thought have predicated the cultivation of non-sovereign political imagination on a disavowal of nationalism. This opposition—between diaspora and nation, between nationalism and non-sovereignty—is false. In eastern Europe, nationalist figurations of galut (exile) have long inspired non-sovereign, non-Spinozist political imaginaries.